Is It Smart? Smart TV is Hacked Allowing Hackers to see you on your Couch & Black Hat USA 2013 Continues in Las Vegas

As Black Hat Conference 2013 goes on, Smart TV is Hacked Allowing Hackers to See you on your Couch!

What is Black Hat USA? Black Hat USA is the show that sets the benchmark for all other security conferences. As Black Hat returns for its 16th year to Las Vegas, we bring together the brightest in the world for six days of learning, networking, and skill building. Join us for four intense days of Training and two jam-packed filled days of Briefings.

The next time you watch something on your Smart TV, beware, the television might be watching you too.

As in turns out, just like smartphones, Smart TVs can be hacked and compromised. On Thursday, at the Black Hat security conference, researchers Aaron Grattafiori and Josh Yavor demonstrated how they found vulnerabilities in different 2012 models of Samsung Smart TVs that allowed them to turn on the camera, take control of social media apps like Facebook or Skype, and access files and basically any app on the set.

“Because the TV only has a single user,” Grattafiori explained to Mashable, “any type of compromise into an application or into Smart Hub, which is the operating system — the smarts of the TV — has the same permission as every user, which is, you can do everything and anything.”

In other words, the hacker has your remote.

With Smart TVs getting more and more popular, 67 million models were sold in 2012, and that figure is expected to grow to 85 million this year, something like this can be a dangerous issue for many people and households.

The two researchers, who work for security firm iSEC Partners, started looking into these vulnerabilities in December of 2012, and reached out to Samsung in early January to alert it of the bugs. The company told CNN that it has issued patches that fix these holes, and it should now harder for hackers to compromise its Smart TVs.

Grattafiori and Yavor, however, believe that other other exploits could potentially be found to attack Samunsg as well as other vendor’s Smart TVs.